GANG GREENE: On a roll and with rookies like Shonn Greene, running for a TD against the Chargers, the Jets and their fans have to be optimistic for Sunday's AFC Championship Game.Anthony J. Causi

In the wake of the Jets’ wild and improbable ride to the brink of their first Super Bowl in 41 years, we borrow from that infamous rant of former NFL coach Dennis Green: The Jets are exactly who they thought they would be.

It’s just that they were the only ones who knew.

For the rest of us, it has taken quite a bit of time to catch up.

And now that the Jets are two road victories deep into this unimaginable postseason of theirs, they’ve given us all reason to believe that not only getting to the Super Bowl is real, but winning the damn thing is hardly out of the question, either.

With the way the Jets are playing defense and running the ball, and the way Rex Ryan has them believing they can conquer the world, why shouldn’t we all be standing up and taking notice? Why should the Super Bowl be so out of the question?

You can bet Peyton Manning is hardly salivating at the prospect of facing that Jets defense on Sunday in the AFC title game.

You, too, can bet that the Bengals, whom the Jets dispatched in the wild-card round two weeks ago, certainly weren’t privy to who the Jets really are.

Neither were the Chargers, whom the Jets shocked 17-14 in Sunday’s divisional round playoff game to send them to their first AFC Championship game in 11 years.

The Jets, led by Ryan and the uncanny confidence he infuses throughout his locker room like an electrical current, insist they’ve been believers all the way.

It’s just that no one else believed and, at times, for good reason considering the Jets’ litany of missteps this season.

But if you pare away the outer shell of this Jets team — the mediocre 9-7 regular-season record, the Ryan bravado and bluster, the incredible series of breaks they got just to get into the playoffs — what you really have in the inner core is a team that’s built on a solid foundation of building blocks that are the seeds that grow winners in NFL.

Teams that have the top-ranked defense and running game in the NFL almost always enjoy postseason success. Since the NFL merger in 1970, of the seven teams that have led the league in both categories, two won the Super Bowl and three made it to the conference championship game.

The Jets have both covered. They also have talented youth as a significant part of that foundation.

The window for continued success for this team should be wide open, considering rookie quarterback Mark Sanchez is getting better by the second and rookie running back Shonn Greene has gone from a change-of-pace reliever for Thomas Jones to one of the stars of this postseason in what seems like 10 minutes.

Add to that the fact that as long as Ryan is here, the Jets are going to have one of the league’s best defenses.

Also overlooked is the fact that the Jets have lost four games in the final seconds, games they surely should have won against the Dolphins, Bills, Jaguars and Falcons. They, too, were almost single-handedly taken down by Sanchez interceptions in the losses to the Saints, Bills and Patriots.

“We lost some very tough games, but all those games that we lost made us mentally tough,” Jets linebacker Bart Scott said. “We’ve lost a lot of games in last seconds and we learned lessons from that. We could easily have been 12-4.”

There’s little question that Sunday’s game, with the Chargers mounting a desperate late comeback, was a game the Jets would have lost two months ago.

“I hope this validates our place in the playoffs and will stop people from saying we backed in,” Scott said. “We earned where we’re at.”

They are exactly who they thought they would be.

We’re all just a little late figuring that out.

It’ll be fascinating theater to see if the 15-2 Colts, who believe they handed the Jets the 29-15 result that ended Indy’s undefeated season and resuscitated the Jets’ payoff hopes, know who the Jets are when they meet again on Sunday.